MONTGOMERY — The Alabama Senate unanimously passed legislation on Wednesday authorizing state intervention on local 911 Centers if they don't meet certain benchmarks.
The bill by State Rep. Reed Ingram (R-Pike Road) would authorize the state 911 Board to monitor call statistics for a local communication district and to share data related to crime reporting with the Office of the Attorney General. The bill would provide that if the 911 Board determines, based on call data, that a local communication district's emergency response is inadequate, the 911 Board may investigate the cause of the inadequacy.
If the district is unable to remedy the problem, the 911 Board may assume direct supervision of the public safety answering center operations until performance, as measured by certain metrics, improves. The bill would further authorize the Attorney General to file a civil action to enforce the 911 Board's investigation of a local communication district or enforce the 911 Board's direct supervision of a district.
The bill passed the House and Senate unanimously and is on Governor Kay Ivey's desk to be signed into law.
Former Montgomery director of Emergency Communications Carl Fortner said the bill is a big change to how 911 service is in Alabama.
"It's getting ready to provide a lot more oversight," Fortner told 1819 News on Thursday.
Ingram told 1819 News on Friday that the bill "holds the 911 Centers accountable on performance and personnel."
"We know that the performance like Montgomery doesn't always have a lot of times the personnel. This gives us the tool in the toolbox to hold them accountable to make sure that we can help them and they need help. If they can't get it together, we can merge them, take that money away, and give it to let's say like another municipality or county that's close, kind of like Mobile has done," Ingram said. "This is the first response of an emergency and we need to know that those people when they call 911 that they're getting someone on the line. This is stimulated from several municipalities, not just Montgomery. Montgomery is hurting on personnel, not only police department but dispatchers. Other systems out there are dragging and this gives the board the ability to be able to say, 'You're out of here. You lose your funding. We're going to give this to somebody else that's going to be able to put our good taxpayer's money to good use and save lives.'"
Ingram continued, "That money that we get on all the cell phones and landlines, it's a 911 charge tax that you're getting."
"Some municipalities are getting more than $10 million and we don't have any accountability on that money. We don't have any teeth on performance," Ingram said. "This puts it in performance mode and also we can track how many real calls come into a 911 center and how many murders, how many shootings, (and) how many wrecks. We know how many robbery calls that came in, mental health as well. This gives us a good tool in the toolbox to be able to make sure that the people out there are getting the phone call answered and getting the help that they need."
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